CloudWatch Pricing Calculator - Logs, Metrics, Alarms & Observability

Custom metrics use tiered pricing: first 10,000 metrics at $0.30/metric/month, next 240,000 at $0.10, next 750,000 at $0.05, and over 1 million at $0.02. The first 10 custom metrics are always free. API requests (GetMetricData, PutMetricData, etc.) cost $0.01 per 1,000 requests. Metric Streams cost $0.003 per 1,000 metric updates.

Standard resolution alarms (1-minute or longer periods) cost $0.10 per alarm metric per month. High resolution alarms (10-30 second periods) cost $0.30 per alarm metric. Composite alarms that combine multiple alarms cost $0.50 per alarm. The first 10 alarms (standard or high-resolution) are free. Dashboards cost $3.00 per dashboard per month, with the first 3 free.

CloudWatch offers a generous free tier: 10 custom metrics, 3 dashboards, 10 alarms, 5 GB of logs data ingested, 5 GB of Logs Insights queries, 100 Synthetics canary runs, 100,000 X-Ray traces recorded, and 1 million X-Ray traces retrieved/scanned per month. Most of these are always free (not limited to the first 12 months).

X-Ray charges $5.00 per million traces recorded, $0.50 per million traces retrieved, and $0.50 per million traces scanned. X-Ray Insights stored costs $1.00 per million. Free tier includes 100,000 traces recorded and 1 million traces retrieved/scanned per month. You can control costs by adjusting the sampling rate in your applications.

Container Insights for EKS with enhanced observability uses tiered pricing: first 1 billion observations at $0.21/million, next 3 billion at $0.18/million, over 4 billion at $0.10/million. Container Insights for ECS costs $0.07 per metric per month, prorated by the hour. Without enhanced observability, Container Insights uses standard CloudWatch metrics pricing.

Synthetics canary runs cost $0.0012 per run. A canary that runs every 5 minutes (8,640 runs/month) would cost approximately $10.37/month. The first 100 canary runs are free each month. Additional costs may include Lambda execution time and CloudWatch Logs storage for canary logs.

Application Signals provides APM capabilities with two modes. With transaction search, tiered data ingestion pricing starts at $0.35/GB. Golden metrics only (basic metrics) uses tiered pricing starting at $1.50/million signals. Spans indexed as X-Ray traces cost $0.75 per million after the first 1%.